Re: [PATCH] mke2fs: don't interact with a non tty

[Phillip Susi <psusi@ubuntu.com>]

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On 3/18/2014 2:31 PM, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> This means that mke2fs will silently continue to format whatever
> accidental device was specified on the command line, instead of
> stopping and asking the user for confirmation.  Instead, it should
> exit with an error in this case.

There *is* no user to ask when stdin is connected to /dev/null.  This
second guessing of the user really goes against the unix way and
shouldn't be there in the first place.  Mean what you say, and say
what you mean.

If you must second guess the user and give an interactive prompt just
in case they made a mistake, then at least only do so when it looks
like there is a user there.  There is no reason to fail when called
from a script.

> There is already the "-f" (force) option to override the cases
> where this prompt is used, so if the user wants to do something
> unusual they should use that as part of the script driving mke2fs.

- --yes-i-meant-what-i-said flags are silly, and make for useless
inconsistencies between the different mkfs.* utilities that makes
writing scripts calling them annoyingly difficult.

> The only time when I think "force" is required when it shouldn't be
> is in case of full-device formatting.  I don't think this should be
> considered a problem unless there is already a partition table on
> the device.  Formatting the whole device is desirable to avoid
> alignment issues on RAID devices, so I would be happy if that
> restriction was lifted.

The same goes for being run on an image file instead of a device node.


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